Next she made frantic and fruitless search for the porter; but the negro, too, had disappeared. Plegg was the alternative now, and she ran breathlessly up the yard to the office bunk car. But this, also, proved to be a hope defeated, or at least deferred. The car was dark when she reached it, and when she tried the door she found it locked. The remaining expedient, the only one that suggested itself, was to run to the Inn railroad station a half-mile distant down the yard, where she knew there was an accessible telephone. It was a lame expedient and she knew it; a thousand things might delay the sending of the message of warning to the tunnel, and time was priceless. Yet she ran, stumbling over the loosely bedded cross-ties, and praying that she might happen upon Plegg or some other member of the staff who would know what to do and how to do it. She had scarcely begun this new flight when she saw one of the construction locomotives lumbering toward her on the main track. The quick wit was coming to its own again, and she stopped, stripping off her coat and stepping into the cone of the headlight beam so that she could be seen when she waved her signal. The engine was Callahan’s “mogul,” and she gave a little sob of joy when she recognized the good-natured Irishman who leaned from his cab window to ask what she wanted. Callahan was the driver with whom she had ridden oftenest when David Vallory had been showing her over the job. “I want you and your engine, Mr. Callahan!” she panted. “Will you take orders from me?” “Sure I will, Miss Vinnie,” was the quick response; and when the fireman had helped her up to the foot-board: “Where will ye be wanting the ould ’Thirty-six to be taking you?” “To the tunnel--as fast as ever you can go! It’s--it’s life and death!” Callahan asked no further questions. Miss Virginia was the big boss’s daughter, and her demands were sufficient law and Gospel for any man on the Grillage Company’s pay-rolls. While the fireman was lifting her to his box, the heavy construction machine went slamming out over the yard switches, shrieking its warning to all and sundry, and the race was begun. Though the track was new and rough, and the detours around the hill cuttings held curves of hazard, Callahan--“Wild Irish,” they called him on the job--slackened speed for nothing. Onward and upward through the gathering darkness roared the big locomotive, vomiting a trail of sparks to mark its crooked climb. Virginia Grillage tried pitifully hard to plan what she should do when the goal should be reached; but the dominant impulse would have nothing to do with cool-headed plannings. David’s life hung in the balance, and David must be warned. She could get no further than this.